Sexualized Bodies And Finance Capital

Let me begin by confessing I am not
the
most appropriate reviewer for this
book.
When I volunteered to review the book, I was certain that the book would be
about transnational commercial surrogacy or biocapital, as Kaushik Sunder
Rajan’s work brilliantly shows us, where finance capital is intermeshed with
trade in body parts: ova, fertilized embryos, embryonic stem cells and cord
blood, a global business running into trillions.
The book is only tangentially about these. And yet, all the
essays, be they about films, time, or risk, look at bodies and at intimacies in
the political economy of global financial capital. ‘How do discourses of risk,
protection, and insurance join sexuality to capital, producing “risky subjects”
imbued with finance? How do sexual economies fuse into moral and political
economies?’ (p. 280).
For a public health worker, the links are very clear. The
concept of risk in public health was reified precisely at the time of the AIDS
and Tuberculosis pandemic, when neo-liberalism was reshaping both the
understanding of health itself, and the provisioning of health services. The
earlier understanding of public health was that health of communities was
socially determined by political and economic structures, that health was a
public good, to be provided by the welfare state. The reshaping that took place
in the light of the new disease, HIV-AIDS, sexually transmitted, was that
health was an individual responsibility, that disease was caused by ‘risky
behaviours’ and that health was a commodity to be purchased in the market.
At the same time, initially, HIV-AIDS was considered a
disease of the gay community, a punishment for sodomite sins, and for drug
addiction, affecting the dregs of society, something no country need be
bothered about. Yet when the disease was seen to cross gender and class
barriers, the public health world stood up and started responding to it with
the discourse of reproductive health and rights. This was also precisely the
time of the LGBT revolution, when sexual identity came to be foregrounded and
reified, when NGOs dealing with issues of same-sex desire, HIV and reproductive
rights were awash with funds so that today we have in India more NGOs than
hospital beds. HIV-AIDS was privileged over health in general, leading again to
a vertical programme.
The imbrications of finance and capital have a long history
as does the policing of sexuality. It was the colonial state, intent on
extraction ...